Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Editorial (English) Intentionality In The Humanities, Chouaib Halifi

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

No abstract provided.

Editorial (Arabic) Intentionality In The Humanities, Chouaib Halifi

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

No abstract provided.

A Geopoetic Approach To Travel Narrative, Rachel Bouvet, Myriam Bergeron

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article presents the foundations of the movement initiated by the International Institute of Geopoetics. The transdisciplinary dimension of this field of research and creation, founded by Kenneth White in 1989, as well as the predominance of certain principles such as nomadism, the outside world and radical criticism, bring together several concerns specific to the travel narrative, located at the intersection of literature and geography. The geopoetic approach opens up reflection both on the poetic pole, i.e. the intrinsic relationship between the journey experienced and the writing of the journey, and on the reading pole, which implies taking into consideration …

Editorial (Arabic) The Culture Of Travel Narrative, Chouaib Halifi

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

No abstract provided.

Editorial (English) The Culture Of Travel Narrative, Chouaib Halifi

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Travel, Antonio García Velasco

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This trip is an invitation to change your life and enrich your customs, to deepen your knowledge and to broaden your own worldview. There are several forms of travel. Travel for pleasure and tourism is not the same as that imposed by personal or socio-political conditions. A distinction must be made between the transfer and the journeyitself. Don Quixote told Sancho that “he who reads a lot and walks a lot sees a lot and knows a lot”. To go, to walk is to travel. And reading, this is the other way of travelling. Currently, a trip without a camera …

The Journey Or The Encounter Of Another Identity, José Luis Barranco

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

The journey implies a new birth, becoming “another”; different from what we were before departure, revolting against one’s own “I”, adopting different values, searching for a new life. The return, if it exists, can mean the failure or astonishment to contemplate what we were once, to consider ourselves as different from what we were before leaving our place of origin.

The Journey Is Also The Return, Segio Barce Gallardo

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

The aim is to explore a variant of travel theory which, in this case, would be the the journey of return or the return to the beloved country. Even if it is a physical journey, this article tries to investigate and prove that the return journey, especially the one made for the first time after a long absence, is also a sentimental and emotional journey. This article analyses both the author’s own work anda series of books written by other authorswho have experienced the same situation and reflected on those situations in novels and stories. Since the author of the …

A Moroccan Gazeat The Rest Of The World, Mohammed Dekhissi

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

The accounts of Moroccan embassies, particularly those of the 17th and 18th centuries, reveal a complex and inextricable discourse. They remain imbued with religious, intellectual and social references and clearly express an experience of univocal otherness, but do not hide the traveler’s amazement - or his fear – about the achievement of the other, at the scientific and technological levels. We will try to explore succinctly what Ibn’Utmân’s description of some Spanish cultural institutions was like. It should be remembered, however, that this is a protocol visit. We will limit ourselves to two examples, that of the theatre and that …

The Journey Of Doctor Fernand Linares To Morocco A Medical Officer At The Service Of The French Colonial Project During The Reign Of Sultan Moulay El Hassan, Farida Samadi

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Dr Fernand Linares unanimously represents a leading figure who has played a crucial role in the French colonial enterprise in Morocco, both in terms of his medical action and his diplomatic role, which he has never ceased to fulfil with skill, tact and great discretion. Taking advantage of his proximity to the Cherifian Court, he has earned the esteem of the sovereign Moulay El Hassan, thanks to his good collaboration in the affairs of the Makhzen, his Moroccan clothing and his mastery of the Arabic language. In doing so, he has provided France with invaluable services in favor of a …

Gender Aspects Of Rihla, El Gharoussi El Mobarik

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Controversially contested, rihla is a genre by itself for the very reasons it is contested for. Anchored in its Arab-Muslim culture, the hijra of the prophet, the cult of pilgrims, and scientific peregrinations, flourished in the Muslim West: it is primarily a Magribine genre. No genre enjoys absolute purity, so does the rihla. It has links with geographical literature, fahrâsa and autobiography. The writing of the narrative in linear form and circular content systematically challenges didactics, pleasant and ethical digressions, but also books: the genre is intertextual.

Models And Functions Of Contemporary Travel, Marie Lasnier Stanford

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

The translated part of the study by Canadian researcher Marie Helene Lasnier provides an approximate picture of the dialectical relationship between the political, economic and ideological changes observed by the West and its impact on international relations in general and the West’s relations with others. This has led to the emergence of two different models of Western travelers: traveler/traveling-writer and writer-traveler. The study concludes that intensive tourism could now be the end of the original and voluntary journey.

The Moorish Ambassador’S Journey To Spain: Cultural Encounters In Ahmed Ben Mehdi Al-Ghazāl’S Natījat Al Ijtihād Fi Al-Mohādana Wa Al-Jihād (1766), Lhoussain Simour

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article attempts to read al-Ghazāl’s travel account Natījat al Ijtihād fi al-Mohādana wa al-Jihād as a valuable archival material and an eighteenth-century subaltern narrative that offers the re-interrogation of the discourse of the Self and the Other from the perspective of the Moroccan traveler. Natījat al Ijtihād is a travel account that gives further historical evidence about one of the less discussed experiences in literature and annals of history, the abduction of Muslims in foreign lands. Such an interdependent overlap between these thematic concerns and the historical context that fuels up al-Ghazzal’s travel-inspired text would give readers the chance …

Travel And Writing, Michel Butor

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

In this study, Butor reconstructs the relationship between two dimensions: thinking about all the questions they expose and the concepts they use. All this is done within a science he invented, it is Iterology. A new science that will study the concept of travel in its four dimensions, and in a relational perspective that links it to reading and writing. These two dimensions are concretized in the following relationships: reading as travel, travel as reading, travel as writing and writing as travel. It also challenges many concepts that are immanent to the concept of “travel”, which extends it to include …

Two Algerians In Morocco: Two Laudatory Visions, Ahmed Makkaoui

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article deals with few contemporary situations in the history of Morocco, based on two Algerian travel accounts: The first by Hamza Bokousha in the late 1940s and the second by Abu Qasim Saadullah in the early 1970s. This contribution puts us in the context of travel, highlighting its motivations, its journey, the major issues addressed, and revealing the cultural, political, social and economic aspects in Morocco under the French Protectorate and after Independence.

From Writing The Journey To The Journey Into Writing, Alkhamissa Allaoui

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Through this article, we seek to emphasize that travel stimulates and enriches imagination. The travel writer tries to transcend the banal aspect of travel and observation to question the obvious and capture the incredible. Indeed, he is convinced that his movement in space and time allows him to observe with circumspective eyes, drawing on imagination, to escape, through his text, into the charms of the mysterious.

Ethnography And Narration In “Women’S Life In Yemen”, Ibrahim Abotalib

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

The travel text (written text that describes the author’s journey to a distant and foreign place) is varied, as are its modes of presentation of ethnographic subjects and observations of a community in a given period. This study deals with topics related to the question of “gender” in the lives of women in Yemen in the 1950s, 60s and 70s of the 20th century, in travel narratives. The narrative by the French doctor “Claudie Fain”, who was in Yemen as an anthropologist as well, tells, according to her friend “France Hoss”, many women’s stories about their suffering. Life and history …

Literature Of The Pilgrimage Trip: The Late Moresque Journey, Abdelhadi Saadoune

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This study aims to introduce a rather little knownliterary text: a manuscript of poems composed by one of the last Spanish Muslimsat the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century. This text is part of an important literary genre that recovers the connections between Moorish Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca, which are an extension of the journeys of Andalusians and Maghrebians of earlier times. This researchendeavor attempts to excavate the journey of a Morisco, a unique historical document on the life, thought and beliefs of an important Muslim community, as well as on the countries, cities, …

Between Dream And Travel, Lina Jammal

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Dreams were motives for travel (Riḥla) during medieval Islam in literary and historical contexts. This article addresses this common motive in the opposite direction, and focuses on travel as a stimulus for dreams. It shows how dreams are actually journeys, but in two different spatial/temporal dimensions. To this end, this article uses contradictory examples to prove that the dream can achieve certain travel objectives such as pilgrimage, knowledge, trade, therapy and the construction of a new identity.

Ibnu Fadlâne And The Creation Of The Literary Travel Text, Abdelrahim Elkurdy

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article attempts to highlight Ibn Fadlan’s founding role in the establishment of the Rihlagenre, through making a transition from pure scientific reporting to literary description that sees the facts of the journey from the perspective of the narrator/hero, as found in the modern novel. The hero faces real risky adventures. The narrator uses the process of manipulating the temporalities of history and discourse, and the processes of moving through space, as used by novelists. The pleasure of the text is aroused by the textures of expectation and anticipation, and also by the astonishment caused by the strange and wonderful …

Can An Ai System Be Creative? A Critical Perspective From Art And Engineering, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

This paper examines the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be creative, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who has also spent most of his life engaged in the arts as actor, stage and film director, writer, composer, and visual artist, and in philosophy. Drawing on Margaret Boden’s foundational framework — both her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational) — the paper argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in …

Ai Is Not The Kind Of Thing That Can Ever Be Sentient, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

Sentience evolved to allow organisms to move through their environment avoiding harms and achieving benefits. Sentience did not evolve from computation. It evolved from valenced feelings. AI (even robots) are not embodied and are not the kind of thing that needs to be sentient. There is no way to get from computations to feelings. They are qualitatively different things. We should avoid being lulled into thinking that an inanimate object designed to engage our propensity for anthropomorphism, like AI, is actually a mind.

Look Out For Our Kind, Christof Koch

Animal Sentience

Strongly supportive overall of Birch’s broad tent Sentience Project, I offer an alternative dyadic, single-class, two-stage process based on estimating the probability for sentience, and the associated confidence, for any individual or taxonomic group. I criticize Birch’s narrow computational framework when addressing the question of algorithmic sentience; there are alternative approaches.

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: The Early Islamic, Medieval And Late Ottoman Pottery, Benjamin J. Dolinka

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The excavation at the entrance to the Visitor Center in the City of David uncovered a small but significant assemblage of ceramics, all from stratified contexts, including bowls, basins, storage jars, jugs, a cooking pot and a clay tobacco pipe. The pottery dates from the Abbasid period (ninth–tenth centuries CE), the medieval period (mid-twelfth–late fourteenth centuries CE) and the late Ottoman period (mid- to late nineteenth century CE). The ceramic evidence from the excavation provides important insights into the occupational history of the site during these periods.

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: The Late Roman And Byzantine Pottery, Debora Sandhaus

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

This article analyzes two pottery assemblages excavated at the entrance of the City of David Visitor Center in Jerusalem, providing important evidence for the occupation and development of the city during the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. The first assemblage, recovered from above the floors of the Stratum VI building, is a homogeneous domestic collection dominated by serving and food-preparation vessels, including arched-rim basins, bowls/lids and a complete Bet Naṭṭif lamp. These finds date the structure to the third–fourth centuries CE and suggest activities associated with food preparation and communal use rather than storage. The second assemblage, recovered from a …

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: Remains From The Late Roman–Late Ottoman Periods, Joe Uziel

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The following report presents the results of an excavation conducted on the summit of the City of David, Jerusalem, which exposed remains of six strata, spanning the Late Roman to the Medieval–late Ottoman period. Although the excavation area was quite narrow, important remains were exposed, contributing to our knowledge of the settlement and character of this portion of the city. Several surfaces interpreted as roads were exposed, beginning with an Abbasid road and continuing until the Medieval–late Ottoman period. Beneath these surfaces, a layer of garden soil, similar in character to the layer exposed in the Giv‘ati Parking Lot, was …

"The First Web Novel At 30: The Collection And The Creative Process", Robert Arellano, Scott Rettberg

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Summer 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Sunshine '69, recognized as the first novelistic hypertext fiction published on the web. While the full work remains accessible online—an "(un)supervised" preservation achievement in itself—the archive remains split between boxes and memory. This conversation between the work's creator and a major scholar in electronic literature documents both specific preservation challenges and systemic patterns in what the field chooses to preserve.

Topics include: figuring out web-born composition before established methodologies existed; the three decades of technical decisions that kept a 1996 work alive through format obsolescence and server migrations; and what gets lost …

The Question Is A Node: Online Quizzes As Interactive Non-Fiction, Michael Merriam

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The quiz is the most widely deployed form of interactive text in education. Even when it is not digitally administered, it presents a prompt, receives a response, and contains within it a formula determining the consequences of that response. A wrong answer is taken as a failure of learning (not mere recall) and, by virtue of their quasi-digital objectivity, a batch of low quiz scores might warn of difficulty in reaching benchmarks. Ergo, quizzes embody the automation of the supervisory function of the instructor, and the supervision of curricula. 

Quiz questions have something in common with nodes in digital interactive …

Reacting To Electronic Literature In Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, Faith Samuel Bassey

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Electronic literature is still quite new in our country, and we do not have enough manpower to drive a literary or scholarly movement.  We need to introduce these concepts to many people; however, we do not have the people we need who know the field well enough to pass on their passion and prowess to get others enthused about electronic literature.

In this talk, I will describe the ways that I have presented my work, The Water Seller, Mai Ruwa, with Deena Larsen. In October 2025,  I presented this work in an in-person conference in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra …

Vibe Coding: Ai, Digital Text Recycling, And The Remediation Of Digital Poetry, Yohanna Joseph Waliya

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This paper theorises Vibe Coding as a novel method of AI-assisted creative practice within electronic literature. Vibe Coding describes an affective mode of communication with AI that enables coding via natural-language prompts, in which the author collaborates with generative AI systems to recycle, remediate, and reconfigure existing digital texts into new poetic forms, including interactive animations. Rather than treating code as a fixed procedural logic, Vibe Coding focuses on rhythm, intuition, and affect as central compositional forces shaping both textual production and computational interaction. Relying on theories of remediation, digital recycling, and posthuman authorship, the paper examines how AI functions …